For a marketer, the sun rises and sets over the ability to provide ROI. Historically, Pinterest ROI has been difficult to calculate, unless you’re manually counting repins and likes, but their new analytics will make the lives of social media managers – and even web designers – significantly easier.

Social media reports for Pinterest and Twitter usually look very similar. Marketers show clients what their follower counts are, the number of likes/favorites or repins/retweets and what content has proven most effective. Managers then turn to their web analytics to track the number of users that went to their from Pinterest and whether or not they actually bought the products. The one tool Pinterest had going for it was its Gifts section as marketers could easily prove that one pin made X amount of sales or Y dollars, but that’s about it by way of analytics.

With the new tools, social managers can see exactly what pictures fans pin from your website. Rather than just measuring how your audience reacts to what you put out, Pinterest analytics measures what articles fans are actively sharing and which photos in particular are gaining traction. Also, Pinterest calculates the number of people who saw each pin. This way managers can figure out the ratio of people that shared or liked content versus the people who actually saw it.

Pinterest analytics will do more than add another page to your social media report by mimicking Twitter and Facebook numbers. Savvy analytics users can see determine what products consumers are just buying, just pinning or both pinning and buying. Furthermore, by following these analytics, managers can start creating content that they already know resonates well with readers, and then let fans do the curation for them.

But Pinterest gave more to businesses than useful analytics, it gave them a voice. At the end of last month, Pinterest created a features polling page for businesses to vote on what changes they want to the site. These changes included bulk editing, scheduled pins and hashtag searches. Businesses spoke, Pinterest listened and analytics are here. (Side bar: whether Pinterest actually used the survey data or if they were planning to release analytics all along is irrelevant, the fact that they’re at least pretending to listen to users does more than most social networks.)

By creating analytics, Pinterest is following the money trail left by older social networks. They’re courting businesses to their site by making ROI measurements easier and have been speculating about sponsored pins. With constant updates and changes to their look, Pinterest is behaving like a grown-up social network. The easy part is that users have already experienced shock and anger about social network ads through Facebook and have simply accepted them as a part of Internet life. If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.

Pinterest may be heading down the road towards sleazy social network strategy, but that’s a problem for the future. Today, businesses, social media managers and Internet marketers will come together and rejoice because Pinterest analytics are here at last.

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